Good Hope Cemetery

Duane's take

The official marker's the one doing the talking here. I'm just Duane, riding along and passing it on. Out on the Ben Rue Survey in Denton County, the land itself did the recruiting.

Fertile soil. Good water. Abundant building materials.

That combination pulled pioneers all the way from Tennessee, Missouri, Georgia, Arkansas, and Wisconsin, and in the 1850s they put down roots together. They called the place the Rue Settlement, and if that name sounds like it belongs to one family in particular, well, it did. The Rue family were probably the first to be buried on that acreage.

Probably. The marker is honest about that uncertainty, and you have to respect honesty in a graveyard. What is certain is this: the earliest legible grave marker belongs to a man named John Phillips, and it's dated 1870.

Whatever came before John Phillips is worn past reading now. More than eighty burials took place before the century turned. Eighty.

You let that number sit a minute. That's not just a community; that's a community acquainted with hardship. Pioneer life had a way of making sure of that.

In 1875, something else took root out here. The Good Hope Baptist Church organized, and when it did, it brought a new name with it. The settlement became Good Hope.

Though you should know (and this is the kind of detail that keeps historians up at night), it was called Parvin at times too. Some places just can't make up their mind. By 1903, the community had grown thoughtful enough about its dead to form a cemetery association, somebody to keep the graveyard from going to weeds and forgetting.

Then, one year later, Ben Rue himself (by that time a resident of Fannin County, living somewhere else entirely) formally transferred the four acres he had long set aside for community purposes over to that association. A man giving away the ground his own family likely rests in. There's a whole story in that one deed.

The churches eventually disbanded. The school closed in 1949. The population drifted off the way populations do when the institutions that hold a community together let go one by one.

And so what's left of Good Hope now is mostly what's always been out there on that acreage: the graves. More than eighty from the nineteenth century alone, and whatever came after. The Good Hope Cemetery stands as one of the few physical reminders of those early pioneers, and of the community that once, by all accounts, thrived here.

Some places, the land outlasts the living. Out here, it's the other way around; the dead outlasted the town.

What the marker says

Attracted to the area by its fertile soil, good water supply, and abundant building materials, pioneers from Tennessee, Missouri, Georgia, Arkansas, and Wisconsin settled here in the 1850s. Their colony, located on the Ben Rue Survey, was first known as the Rue Settlement. Members of the Rue family were probably the first to be buried on the acreage that now makes up this cemetery, but the earliest legible grave marker, that of John Phillips, is dated 1870. More than 80 burials took place in the 19th century, reflecting the hardship of pioneer life. The name Good Hope was taken after the Good Hope Baptist Church organized in 1875. The settlement also became known as Good Hope, although at times it has been called Parvin as well. In 1903, a cemetery association was formed to care for the graveyard. One year later Ben Rue (then a resident of Fannin County) formally transferred the four acres he had set aside for community purposes to the cemetery association. After area churches disbanded and the school closed in 1949, the community population declined. The Good Hope Cemetery thus stands as one of the few physical reminders of the early area pioneers and of the community that once thrived here. Texas Sesquicentennial 1836-1986